ROME — A 54-year-old bricklayer killed his wife and two sons, 16 and five, “to free them from demons,” Carabinieri said he told them on Sunday.

 The man, Giovanni Barreca, said he murdered the victims in their home outside Palermo at the urging of a Sabrina Fina, 42, and Massimo Carandente, 50, whom he met through evangelical prayer services. In a text to a friend two weeks before his murder, Barreca's elder son referred to Fina and Carandente as "the Brothers of God," raising fears of a formalized, violent sect in the Palermo countryside. 

 Barreca called 112 just after 3 a.m. on Sunday morning to tell a dispatcher he had killed his family. “Come and get me,” he said. 

 Carabinieri arrived at Barreca’s home in Altavilla Milicia, a commune southeast of Palermo, to find his two sons dead in their beds. Autopsy results have not yet been released but Emanuel, five, appears to have been suffocated. Kevin, 16, seems to have been strangled with a chain, Termini Imerese prosecutors said. Initial findings indicate that the boys were killed on Friday, two days before Barreca's confession call.

 Investigators have not shared 42-year-old Antonella Salamone, Barreca's wife's, cause of death. Carabinieri found her remains burned and partially buried a short distance from her home. She was murdered at least a week before her sons were, prosecutors said.

 Barreca and Salamone's daughter, whom her father called his "favorite child," was alive in her bedroom when patrols arrived at the property. She told Carabinieri that her father had been rambling during the night about “demonic presences,” Il Fatto Quotidiano reported. She is now in protective care. 

 Barreca was immediately forthcoming during police interrogations. He told investigators that Fina, unemployed, and Carandente, a "mental coach" and promoter of slimming teas, had aided and abetted his rampage.

 He said he had met the couple at Altavilla’s Dio è Fedele evangelical church, where the three of them, and Salamone, had been congregants. Barreca said that he, Fina, and Carandente formed an intense religious relationship. They left Dio è Fedele — "Satan is using corrupt pastors," Carandente wrote in one Facebook post — to begin praying in private. 

 Salamone seems to have been involved with the trio. Giole Imburgia, Dio è Fedele’s head pastor, said that by the time of the murder she “had drifted away” from his church. In a recent run-in, she had told him “she was praying and reading sacred scriptures at home with other people,” he said.

 Investigators have released few details about the group's private services. Barreca, Fina, and Caradente, though, used their social media profiles almost exclusively to share about their faith. The three of them were zealous supporters of religious leaders like Roberto Amatulli: a Bari hairdresser who, after experiencing a conversion during the 2020 pandemic, began traveling through Calabria and Sicily as an evangelical pastor and exorcist. Amatulli shares videos of his prayers, exorcisms, healings — he claims to be able to cure alcoholism, for example — and doomsday warnings with an online audience which has swelled since the Altavilla murders from about 750 accounts to over 4,000. 

 Prosecutors say their investigation is ongoing. So far they have charged Berraca, Fina, and Carandente each with triple homicide and with concealing a corpse. 

 Fina and Carandente have denied any participation in or knowledge of the murders. "They are both desperate, crying their eyes out," their lawyer Sergio Sparti told reporters. 

 Salamone's brother, Calogero Salamone, told Rai News Tuesday that Antonella had shared with him that Fina and Caradente believed her and at least one of her sons to be possessed by demons. Fina and Caradente thought she had to be "buried and burned," Antonella told Calogero. 

 And a classmate of Kevin's, Salamone and Barreca's 16-year-old, told Rai that Kevin had texted him on Feb. 4 about two people spending time at his house. He called them "the Brothers of God." Since their arrival, Kevin's little brother Emanuel had become convinced that his hosue was full of "demons" who would kill and destroy him, Kevin told his friend.  

 Altavilla's mayor, Pino Virga, has suspended all events celebrating Carnevale, and evangelical churches around Palermo have scrambled to distance themselves from the crime. "All forms of violence," wrote Dio è Fedele pastor Imburiga in a statement, are "contrary to the teachings of peace and love of Our Lord Jesus Christ." 

 Amatulli, the exorcist, addressed the murders on his TikTok. “The devil wants to destroy Jesus’ work,” he said. “Keep believing.”